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US Missile Defense Test Fails
KingRobot sends news that a recent test of a US missile defense system has failed. The test of the Groundbased Midcourse Defense interceptor apparently had a problem with the sea-based X-band radar. Both the target missile, launched from the Pacific, and the interceptor, launched from California, performed as expected. "Yesterday's test was intended to quell doubters of the entire missile-defense approach, with the target missile deploying countermeasures. Critics of the GMD programme say that tests thus far, which have not included such spoilers, have been too kind to the intercept tech. The [military] isn't disclosing whether the intercepting kill vehicle had simply failed to reach the 'threat cluster' of warhead(s) and decoys, or whether it had reached the cluster but hit a countermeasure rather than the actual target."
Did the test fail, or the missle? The difference is that a failed test means you don't get any useful information about the device under test, whereas a successful test means that you found out whatever you wanted to know about the device under test.
Example: a test to determine whether a cellphone fails when immersed in water. If you find that your water has been shut off, you have a failed test, because you can't even try immersing the phone in water. If your water works and you immerse the phone and it stops working, the test is successful and your result is that the phone failed. If it still works, then you have a successful test and a phone that didn't fail.
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Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
Not to mention the side benefit of generating productive tech, instead of just destructive tech. The problem with the moon missions is that the big defense corporations running the US just can't justify such large profits with moon missions. The population (or its politicians) are much less willing to fund if there is no fear factor. Fear does not drive the moon mission development like it does for military expenditure unless you try and use the fear of China doing it first to our exclusion, but even then it's still not the same kind of primeval motivation == less profit.
Perhaps the more important question is assessing whether the future of warhead delivery is fancy ICBMs or cheap-ass panel vans.
ICBMs are cool as symbols of military/industrial/scientific might and are, for the moment, the last word in penetrating the borders of a hostile power; but they are tricky to build, extremely expensive, and (even if difficult to intercept) trackable back to their source.
They are pretty much exactly the weapon that you would expect as a culmination of the US/USSR "two nuclear superpowers staring at each other across well defined, and substantially closed, lines" period. In a period of relatively open trade, assorted third parties, and general proliferation, though, it isn't at all clear that you can expect the next warhead to come by ICBM, rather than by Fedex...
Even if it actually worked, a lot of this missile defence stuff reeks of wrinkly old guys shoving money at their contractor buddies in order to finally have the weapons systems that they wanted during the cold war.
You make an interesting point.
However, I'd like to make the irrefutable counter-argument that missiles and rockets are cool while inspecting ships, planes and trucks is boring.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Funny but that world existed for about 20 years. The US pretty much could have nuked any nation on earth at will from 1945 until around the mid sixties.
The old Soviet Union had no effective to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental US until the early to mid sixties.
The USSR could have hit Europe, Japan, and Alaska but odds are that maybe one or two bombers might hive gotten through to the US and the few ICBMs the USSR had would have been destroyed on the ground. That is one of the reasons that the USSR put missiles in Cuba so they could have a workable threat to the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Umm, no.
A couple of things. First, one must consider that "countless" innocent civilians were NOT killed by the two atomic bombs. About 240,000 total was the count (over a period of several months - the immediate casualties of the bombs were closer to 150,000). Note that more were killed in one night of routine bombing of Tokyo than in both atomic bombings combined.
Second, the assertion that "Japan was finished by the time USA dropped the bombs". Remember Okinawa? Two months before the atomic bombings, and the Japanese managed to inflist 50,000 American casualties for one small island? Now, imagine extending that to the invasion of the entirety of Japan...
Third, if Japan were indeed "finished" before we dropped the bombs, why didn't they surrender after the first bomb was dropped? It's not like we dropped them on the same day - plenty of time to get to a radio and cry "uncle" if they were so inclined.
We won't even go into the oddity that both cities (and several others) were spared conventional bombing for years. The AAF wanted, if we actually used the Bomb, to get information on the effects of the Bomb on undamaged cities. So they made a list of military targets (Hiroshima's Naval Base comes to mind) that were put off limits for bombing. I understand that the AAF brass had to do quite the song and dance to justify to their subordinates not bombing those cities for years....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse
Key difference: The US had forward operating bases. You can't reach the USSR from North America with 1940s/1950s bomber technology but you can reach it from Turkey, the UK, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Norway, etc, etc.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.